Forget swallowing or stuffing the c4. The new fear is surgical insertion of explosives. Body bombs. Check out these links:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/13/al-qaeda-s-body-bombs-al-asiri-s-next-threat.html

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/officials-fear-terrorists-body-bombs-us-bound-planes/story?id=16245827

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18161870

I hope someone will soon put to the legal test the assertion that what this allows police to do without a warrant can be done by any citizen, including by any citizen towards the police. This may help to support the rights of citizens to record police officers while they are on duty. Hey, if any property that doesn't have a building on it is fair game for surveillance, by anyone, it opens up opportunity for all of the citizenry. Not saying I like this, but maybe there is a positive side to it.

Yeah, and the "who".

Their thought: "hey, well catch the bad guys who are trying to get around security!"
Reality: they catch the nerds who know how to hack barcodes and want to save 10 minutes of waiting in a security line.

But this is giving them too much credit. They are not thinking that far ahead. They are still stuck on shoe bombs (22 Dec 2001).

If this sounds a little familiar, well, it is... http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/10/24/2222225/ But I like the tie in with the /. logo today. Will that logo get me a faster screening?

Yes. That's what jumped out at me too. Revealing medical mistakes is a reason to do *more* autopsies. And any doctors or hospitals who are "uncomfortable" with that need to get out of the business. If you are not interested in having some QC to improve your processes, I don't want you involved in my medical care.

Why are you explaining and asking permission to use a tool? Download git, install it, use it, done. Standard practice, free, so what's the issue? Just do it. The management doesn't want to see how the sausage is made.

Also, there is a "manage your management" issue here. When the bosses ask if you need anything, you need to provide answers that they understand and can accomplish. Asking for something they don't understand and don't know how to get for you leads to them feeling stupid and ineffective. Line up your own tools without bothering them. When they ask what you need be ready with something that they can easily accomplish, like stocking the fridge with Mt. Dew.

Well if the ER just gives the patient more homeopathic treatment it will save those 10s of thousands of pounds. Mission accomplished.

BTW, reading your .sig, I should have sprinkled my post liberally with ~s.

To some extent I am just being a smart-ass agitator. But the serious point within the snarking is that large health care institutions like NHS or Medicare don't care if you are healthy. They just want you to live and die while pulling as few dollars as possible from the pool, and without making a fuss that will cause them trouble. No one judges the administrators of these programs by how healthy the people in their program are.

Wrong. Your problem is in your definition of "works". Works mean achieves some goal you were trying to reach, and perhaps the goal you are thinking of is not the one NHS is trying to reach. Their job is not to cure everyone of everything. Their job is to *control expenses* while *minimizing complaints*. And it is very likely that providing homeopathy will help achieve those goals. Therefore it "works". Remember, even the homeopathy supporters admit that often treatments do not contain even a single molecule of the diluted substance. (cite ) I cannot think of a more cost effective treatment than water, maybe with a bit of food coloring. Even a small reduction in whining would make it cost effective. From an institutional health perspective it's pure genius!!

Our vocal chords make clicks. In very low tones I can hear the individual clicks. I can see it being possible to for a person to gain the control over their voice to be able to make a single click, then do that at whatever interval they want. That doesn't really seem like a "tone" to me, but this must be what they are doing here.

Feynman reveled in the multitude of phenomena that we do not yet understand, and he had a way of sharing that fascination and excitement with the student/listener/reader. Many of his lectures, to me at least, seem to primarily be attempts to describe the landscape of science, which things are known and where there is unexplored territory, or at least unanswered questions. And the picture he paints indicates that what we understand is a small percentage of the world/universe around us. There are so many basic things that we can observe, describe, and even predict, but we don't actually understand how they work. Like gravity.

Smart people are a threat to those who hold power. Especially the subset of smart people who are politically engaged and willing to put themselves at risk to protest and demand change. And among them, the subset who are world famous and therefore have easy access to the press, well, they are just beyond dangerous.

There is a long history of new dictatorial regimes wiping out, killing, or scaring away all of the educated class, thus making the general populace less likely to organize, garner international attention, or outsmart anyone in the regime. This fits the pattern.

Careful selection of the crew for the first manned mission to the sun could dramatically improve the quality of political discourse here on earth. (Think "B Ark")

Well, I don't know if any of those really have "value", except possibly the image sorting. But in all cases I can probably build algorithms that do it faster, cheaper, and possibly better than the average person getting paid a dollar an hour to do it.

First of all, as someone who's work in parallel computing for a while, I think it's actually quite hard to define tasks that actually have value that can be broken down into such small and easy sub-tasks. And within the set of problems where you can do that, there is a pretty large overlap between what a completely untrained person can do and what a perl script can do. So the whole idea of an army of anonymous random humans adding microvalue that adds up to big value is problematic for me. Maybe there is theoretical value there, but so many things could go wrong.

Secondly, if you can clearly define a task like that, and what it is worth to you, why restrict your solution to humans? Provide an API and let me try to solve it algorithmically. If all you care about is getting the task done, what does it matter whether I get it done with a dozen Indian subcontractors, a thousand trained monkeys, or a clever little genetic algorithm?

Actually you *can* do that kind of multi-dimensional filtering, equivalent to multiple AND statements followed by a GROUP BY. There are different data sets here, with different usage models. Perhaps most interesting is the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). Docs here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/data_documentation/public_use_microdata_sample/

PUMS contains records representing individual responses to the American Community Survey (ACS). These individual responses include detailed data including housing data (# rooms, heating fuel, property value, mortgage, age of house, etc) and personal data (family income, vehicles, employments status, # children, language spoken, etc). Now, ACS is a sample, not a full enumeration like the decennial census, but the sampling is done carefully in an attempt to be representative. Full record definition here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/data_documentation/pums/DataDict/PUMS_Data_Dictionary_2006-2010.pdf

Back to the confidentiality question: this detailed data is carefully altered to protect individual privacy while still being correct at an aggregate level. Here's what the site says about this protection:

"As required by federal law, the confidentiality of ACS respondents is protected through a variety of steps to disguise or suppress original data while making sure the results are still useful. The first means of protecting is the suppression of all personal identification, such as name and address, from each record. In addition, a small number of records are switched with similar records from a neighboring area or receive another collection of characteristics developed by using a modeling technique. Age perturbation is one example of procedures that disguise original data by randomly adjusting the reported ages for a subset of individuals. The answers to open-ended questions, where an extreme value might identify an individual, are top-coded. Top coded questions include age, income, and housing unit value. In addition to modifying the individual records, respondents' confidentiality is protected because only large geographic areas are identified in the PUMS."